The Quick Take for April 21, 2014

Critics react to the new TV season, a handful of streaming picks, and more.

Heather Cate/ April 21, 2014

The Quick Take for April 21, 2014

Critics react to the new TV season, a handful of streaming picks, and more.

Heather Cate/ April 21, 2014

Streaming Picks

On demand and Amazon Instant Video this week are Philomena (our review) and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (our review). The Bible, the 2013 miniseries by the History Channel, is newly available on Netflix. For the kids, try Holes on Netflix, based on the novel by Louis Sachar, starring a very young Shia LaBeouf.

Critics Roundup

Mad Men Season 7 premiered just over a week ago, and two episodes have aired. After the premiere episode aired, critics began recapping, writing about the episode's plot and themes. (Don't click through unless you're willing to have plot points spoiled!) Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture says, "Don is damaged goods. He's pre-AA Freddy Rumsen, plus genius, with Rock Hudson good looks." Sam Adams for Indiewire writes, " . . . as the character who moves between [time] zones–and who has his strangest, most soul-searching moment while in the effectively timeless space of an airplane in flight–Don is a man out of time, belonging nowhere." Alissa Wilkinson, our chief film critic, writes for Christ & Pop Culture, that Don "is dying of thirst. He's just not sure what he's thirsty for anymore." As Wilkinson concludes, "Whatever this is the 'start' of, we'd better be paying attention."

Fargo, an adaptation of the Coens' 1996 film, premiered this past Tuesday on FX. Billy Bob Thornton plays Lorne Malvo, whom Ben Travers for Indiewire calls Heath Ledger's Joker "without the makeup and the scars." The miniseries is 10 episodes long, and producer and writer Noah Hawley takes advantage of the flexibility of television (as opposed to film) "to lure in viewers with the lovingly quirky world of small town Minnesota lifestyles before knocking them upside the head with the unwanted darkness of a world outside the white picket fences." Hawley goes on to say that the miniseries presents "two superficially opposite lifestyles without being condescending to either" and lets "the stories unfold as they actually happened."

Movie News

The official list of films competing at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival came out last week. Among the directors are Jean-Luc Godard, Bennett Miller, Tommy Lee Jones. Variety reports that this year 15 female directors will also be represented. The Dissolve critics say the most anticipated films are The Captive, with Ryan Reynolds, Lost River, directed by Ryan Gosling, and few more. The festival will run from May 14 to May 25.

Heather Cate is a spring intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King's College in New York City.